Heal Thyself
by Mad Maudlin
Summary: And Ron had followed him into the Forbidden Forest. And Ron had carried him out again. And it was Ron who tried to fix him when he broke.


Heal Thyself

by Mad Maudlin

"I can't do it," Ron said quietly, watching his muddy trainers instead of Harry's face. "I'm sorry."

"I don't blame you," Harry told him, "really. You didn't have to do this."

Ron snorted. "Course I did."

"You could've...you didn't have to stay."

Ron looked up, then, and he might've been trying to smile but his face was too swaddled in bandages to tell for sure. "Of course I did," he said, then looked away.

They listened in silence to the hustle and bustle in the hospital wing muffled only by a thin curtain that barely concealed their beds. This was a space meant for broken bones and misTransfigured noses, not war wounded, and the noise carried a little too well.

"So what will you do?" Harry asked. "I mean, if you're not applying to the Aurors. Do you know?"

Ron shrugged with his one good shoulder and peeked through the gap in the curtain. "Dunno. Haven't really thought about it, you know?"

"Yeah," Harry said, and watched Ron watch the Healers racing from bed to bed.

--/--

So it hadn't really been a surprise when Ron started his apprenticeship at the hospital, not to Harry. The rest of the Weasleys ranged from enthusiastically surprised to blankly incredulous, but at some point in the last year or so Ron had sprouted a thicker skin and didn't seem to notice either.

"You?" Fred—maybe George—had asked with a snort. "They're going to let _you_ be a Healer?"

"Eventually," was all Ron replied.

"I think it's wonderful," Mrs. Weasley said with her eyes shining.

Ron shrugged, both shoulders working now.

Nobody was surprised when the Aurors accepted Harry; he fancied that Scrimgeour had been awaiting the application the way little children wait for Father Christmas. Luckily Kingsley was in charge of the training program now, and promised to treat Harry like a proper recruit rather than a Ministry mascot.

"Don't think," he told Harry, "that taking down just one Dark wizard makes you qualified, no matter how many Horcruxes he had."

Harry knew it was meant as a joke but he answered, "You don't have to worry about that," quite in earnest.

Ron surprised Harry in the dead of one night—not by talking, because they were both used to lying awake and fitting words into the silence—but by asking, "What do you think she'd be doing now?"

Harry's thoughts froze, and his breath felt stuck in his throat.

"Probably something at the Ministry," Ron said after a little bit, with a painful little quaver in his voice. "Or house elves. Or both."

_But she hadn't talk about Spew in ages, _Harry thought, but his tongue was too numb to say it.

"Yeah," Ron said more firmly, "she would've applied to the Ministry so she could free the house-elves...get special rights for werewolves...that sort of thing. Probably would've done it, too, inside ten years, don't you think?"

No, Harry didn't think. He couldn't, and he didn't really want to. In the darkness he stayed silent, and Ron eventually rolled over and went to sleep.

--/--

They moved into their own flat soon after—Ron promising to pay back his share of the rent once he was off the apprentice's stipend—and this was how they spent their evenings: they studied different books side-by-side with swiftly chilling take-away at hand, and they didn't speak. Ron was up late most nights practicing different potions, and as he emptied jars and bottles and tins, Harry took them to the living room for target practice.

On Sundays they ate dinner at the Burrow and made small talk about their jobs. There were different days for different graves scattered through the month, but those Sundays they always visited Hermione. Harry stood back and watched anything but the stone marker: Ron conjured a single flower for her and ran his fingers through the engravings without reading them.

--/--

Summer faded.

Ron seemed to improve as time went on, at least, as far as Harry could tell. He ate more and he talked more: at those Sunday dinners he could be counted on to trot out at least one funny anecdote about the hospital as he rotated through each ward. He seemed to genuinely enjoy the work, but Harry was never quite sure because they had separate bedrooms now. It was astonishing how much you could learn about a person by watching them sleep.

Harry's job was little different from what he'd been doing for the past three years except that he was now getting paid for it. He didn't see the point in talking about it with people who were already trying to forget. If someone asked him a question, he would answer, but for the most part he stared at the gaps between chairs, looking for the faces that were never coming back.

One day they arrived a bit later than normal and Mrs. Weasley didn't get around to clucking her tongue until dessert. "Ron, why didn't you tell me you got a commendation from the hospital?"

Harry looked away from the hole between Ginny and George in time to see Ron's cheeks go faintly green. "'Snot important," he mumbled into his cake.

"Nonsense," Mrs. Weasley said. "I was talking to Hestia Jones the other day and she said the Director himself awarded it to you!"

"Blimey," Fred said. "Who'd you shag to get that?"

_"Fred! _Hestia said it was something about protecting one of the senior Healers—"

Ron swallowed. "A bloke came in with hallucinations and attacked Healer Fidgel," he said softly. "I disarmed him and put him in a body-bind before he could harm her."

And his voice was so low and so flat and so _sad_ that Harry couldn't bear it anymore. "I'm going to have a bit of a walk," he said standing up.

Ron said, "I'll come, too."

They paced each other around the back garden in silence, and they didn't even look up, and when they did go back inside Ron made certain to change the subject.

--/--

One night Harry dreamed that Hermione was scolding him in the Common Room. _You're behind on your Transfiguration practice, _she said, wiping at the blood that streamed down her face, _and you can't do a Summoning Charm, and Ron is sad, and you got a _T _on your Herbology essay! _

_What am I supposed to do?_ Harry asked her. _How am I supposed to fix it?_

_You're not trying hard enough!_

_I don't know what to do!_

_Why don't you study more? Why don't you understand?_

_You're supposed to help me!_

Ron woke him up with a thump on the door. "Mate? You okay?"

"Yeah," Harry croaked, and scrubbed at his own cold sweat. He half expected to find Hermione's blood under his fingernails. "Yeah...dreaming."

Ron was silent for a long time. "All right," he finally said, barely loud enough for Harry to make out. "I'm working a long shift today."

"All right."

"See you tonight."

It was four o'clock in the morning on nineteen September. She would've been nineteen years old.

--/--

New Aurors were trained in hand-to-hand combat on the principle that they shouldn't be completely helpless if disarmed. Of course, they weren't supposed to be disarmed, and Harry rather thought that the sorts of enemies who would be able to disarm them were not going to wait around for a punch in the stomach, but this was how the training had gone for a hundred years and he wasn't going to complain.

Not when Kingsley spent the morning knocking him on his arse without a piece of wood in sight. Not when he had to concentrate fiercely and unlearn his half-remembered Dudley-deflecting techniques. Not when the bruises and the twinges and the scrapes could take his mind off things infinitely more painful.

In the afternoon Kingsley said, "Now I'm going to watch you practice."

"With who?" Harry asked.

Kingsley opened a cabinet in the far corner of the room and inside there was a golem made of dull, unglazed clay; it stepped forward when Kingsley tapped it with his wand, footsteps clicking. "This is Bob," Kingsley said. "He's bewitched for this kind of drilling. Don't worry, he can't actually hurt you—Moody himself put that charm on. Got sick of reattaching arms, he says."

Harry examined the statue, which was human-shaped in only the most general sense: its arms and legs were oddly proportioned and its face had the barest bumps and dents for features. "Am I allowed to practice with this on my own time?" he asked.

"Sure, if you want—I can show you the spells before you go." Kingsley tapped the golem again, and it assuming a fighting crouch. "Now let's get to it."

--/--

Harry spent the rest of the afternoon dodging ceramic fists and bruising his knuckles on a sculpted jaw. Kingsley sent him home early with a short list of the incantations for Bob and instructions to ice some of his nastier bruises.

The flat was dark and empty, and Harry lingered there only long enough to be certain that Kingsley wouldn't catch him coming back.

--/--

He had to Floo home; something in his right shoulder had sort of popped, and he couldn't even raise his wand high enough to send Bob back to the corner cabinet. The flat was dark again, but when Harry stumbled swearing from the fireplace he heard movement in the kitchen before Ron tottered out, clutching some sort of a bottle in one hand.

"'m home," he called dully, bracing himself against the top of the chair with his left arm.

"What the hell happened to you?" Ron blurted.

"Practicing."

"Practicing what, how to resist torture?"

Harry was too tired to snap at Ron for overreacting. He clutched his right arm to his chest and started to limp towards his bedroom. "Gonna grab a shower," he announced. Maybe the hot water would help put his shoulder right.

Ron stopped him with one hand and flicked on the lights with the other. It made Ron look very pale and bleary-eyed, and they were standing close enough for Harry to smell liquor on his breath; he studied Harry intently, though, before he said. "Get in the tub and wait for me."

Harry blinked at him.

"Healer's orders, Potter."

In the misty bathroom mirror, Harry decided that Ron wasn't quite overreacting; he was bruised and swollen and scraped raw by rough clay in places he barely remembered being hit. It had been more important to keep moving, kept attacking, until his mind went blank and there was nothing there to hurt him. He realized he couldn't raise his arm high enough to remove his own shirt.

Ron came in, having traded the drink for some potions. "What's the matter?" he asked.

Harry suddenly noticed every sore spot on his body at once, and felt very old. "I hurt my arm," he said softly, squeezing his eyes shut.

He heard Ron set the bottle on the edge of the sink, felt Ron run a hand across his shoulders. "Which one—right?"

"Yeah."

Ron helped him get the shirt off and probed Harry's shoulder gently; his fingers felt strangely cool and soft, unreal. He lifted the arm until Harry hissed aloud, then traced a curve of muscle with his wand tip. Whatever had popped while he was sparring de-popped with a stab of pain, but it faded quickly and the arm worked properly again.

"Into the tub with you, now."

Ron fiddled with his bottles by the sink while Harry finished undressing and climbed into the hot bath. He felt strangely numb for all his aches and pains; he couldn't bring himself to feel very interested in the purplish liquid Ron added to the water, or the way he rolled up his sleeves and knelt by the edge. "Lean forward," Ron said. "You look like you've been beaten, you know that? With pointy sticks."

"I was sparring with Bob."

"Who the hell is Bob?"

"A statue."

Ron started rubbing something thick and herby-smelling over Harry's back: it went on shockingly cold but warmed almost immediately, warming him more that mere bathwater could. "On second thought, I don't wanna know," Ron grumbled. "What made you think getting the shit beat out of you by a statue was a good idea?"

"I was winning," Harry mumbled.

Ron pushed Harry's sweaty hair off his neck and rubbed the potion it, practically massaging the knots out. The smell of drink was gone from his breath. "What made you think she'd have wanted this, mate?"

Harry didn't answer. He couldn't answer. A weak dig about wanting him to get drunk instead drifted between his ears, but his tongue was too glued up to say it. He didn't want to think about what Hermione wanted, he just wanted to forget—except, no, he did want to remember her, but remembering always lead to missing her, and missing her hurt more than he could bear.

What Hermione would've wanted didn't matter because Harry had to keep going. For her sake. For his own. Any way that he could manage to, he would.

Ron finished whatever he was doing and tugging Harry's shoulder. "Lean back for me."

Harry started to, but he was suddenly aware of something rising below his waist—it was ridiculous, when he felt so disconnected from his body, so numb. "Um."

"I can't reach your legs like this, mate."

"I'm all right."

"You were limping."

Harry sighed, shut his eyes again and leaned back, resigned; he couldn't feel embarrassment, not now, not on top of everything else. Ron didn't say a word, just reached through the water to probe his ankles and rub the same thick lineament into his calves. There wasn't anything about the touch that should've been sexual; perhaps it was just warm water and adrenaline and being touched at all by somebody else, even Ron, even today. Perhaps he was just going mad. Ron was downright professional about it, though, working his way up Harry's thighs and stomach, soothing bruises and sealing scrapes and probing for damaged bones all while ignoring the world's most inappropriate erection. There was no reason for it to feel good, not here and not now, but at the same time he was so exhausted...

By the time Ron had cleaned and closed the last cut on his face, Harry felt bonelessly relaxed and on the verge of dozing off right there in the tub. Ron splashed him a bit and said, "You're going to want to rinse that ointment off, it dries like cement."

"'kay," Harry said. He considered asking if sleeping in the tub would be a feasible alternative.

"You're getting pruny, too."

"Mmm-hmm."

"You can't sleep in the bathtub, Harry."

When had Ron become a Legilimens? Harry slowly sat up and groped for the soap, grumbling to himself in a way that made Ron crack a faint smile.

Ron left him in privacy, popping in only once more to leave a clean pair of pajamas and a couple of towels. He looked like he wanted to say something, something serious again, but changed his mind; when Harry finally dried off and shuffled to bed, he noticed a light still burning in the kitchen. He paused in the hallway a long time before going into his bedroom and shutting the door behind him.

--/--

As it happened they were both doing poisons the first week of October. Suddenly the nightly routine changed, and they were sitting knee to knee or hip to hip, reading out of each other's books and confusing their curries as they tried to understand this Dark ritual or that common household brewing accident. Ron trotted out more notes from Potions class than Harry ever remembered him taking, and they quizzed each other over symptoms and antidotes long into the night.

"You're looking better," Bill commented to Harry one Sunday. "Both of you."

"Thanks."

"Is Ron doing better?"

They sat up all night poring over books and scrolls and ignoring the person who should've been there, helping them understand it all. But they were talking. "I don't really know."

"What about you?"

"I'm fine."

Harry did well on his poisons module and moved on to concealment and disguise. Ron went back to studying on his own, but somehow they didn't quite break the habit of sitting close enough to read each other's notes. Harry remembered that they had sat like that in school, too, once upon a time, before dark lords and hormones had intervened; once they had sat practically in each other's laps to study and revise, and Hermione had sat across from them and tutted. But that was a long time ago.

--/--

Ginny found him in Hogsmeade while he was doing his examination in concealment and disguise. He had walked the high street all morning, surrounded by students and villagers and totally ignored: it was a strange, liberating feeling, and also somewhat frightening, when even people he knew and liked looked through him like a stranger, or a ghost. Kingsley let him remove the spells for a lunch break and Ginny practically pounced on him when she noticed.

"How've you been? How's Ron? What're you doing up here? D'you have time to talk? Kingsley, does he have time to talk?"

Kingsley laughed and gave them an hour before he excused himself from the table. Ginny took his seat. "I'm fine," Harry told her. "I'm up here for training. Concealment and disguise."

"I was wondering why I hadn't heard you were here already. You must be doing well."

"Have to, to pass."

"Of course. What about Ron? He's crap at keeping up with letters."

Harry shrugged. "Fine, I guess. I don't really know."

"Don't really know? What, you flat together, don't you?"

"We're busy."

Ginny scowled and sipped her butterbeer. "You're a real boy, Harry, you know that?"

"Well, I was the last time I checked." That made her laugh.

They chatted about her classes and his training and even gossiped a bit about the teachers and some students Harry knew. It was strange in an entirely different way, and unsettling, because he had a feeling that if he let himself, he could pretend all too easily that this was a life he hadn't had, a road not taken because it was never open to him in the first place. Ginny seemed to catch on.

"Does he talk to you about her?" she asked suddenly. "Hermione, I mean."

"No," Harry said stiffly. "We don't talk about her."

Ginny sighed. "I know he won't talk to me about it...I thought maybe because I wasn't there, or something."

Harry wasn't there either. Harry had run away in search of help and left Ron alone to watch her die. By the time he had returned she was already cold, and Ron's hands were stained red from stroking her hair, and he was crying without making a sound. He didn't speak again for over a week, in fact, and that was only to inform Harry point-blank that he wasn't going anywhere with out him.

"Why'd you wanna know?" Harry asked, reluctantly, wishing for a change of topic.

Ginny toyed with her empty glass. "I just...Christmas is coming."

"Yeah."

"I'm worried."

There was nothing for Harry to say.

"Sorry," she said. "I just...never mind. Let's talk about something else."

"Like what?"


End file.
